Published on : Wednesday, September 19, 2018
This Chinese online travel platform announced a plan to start a new sub-platform in its mobile app, offering one-stop booking services ranging from hotels to scenic spots tickets which cover all cities along high-speed railways.
James Liang, Ctrip’s co-founder and executive chairman pointed out that Chinese people are capable of traveling more than their global peers as China’s high-speed railway network enables them to travel to faraway places for less money and time.
China had more than 25,000 km of high-speed railways by the end of 2017. The country aims to increase high-speed railway mileage to 30,000 km by 2020, covering over 80 percent of China’s big cities.
Liang predicted China’s high-speed-railway-based tourism market would exceed 100 billion yuan (about 14.6 billion U.S. dollars) by 2020 and over half of the estimated 3-billion passenger trips on high-speed railways will be made for tourism purposes by 2025.
Inbound tourism has become an emerging contributor to economic growth of China as the sector raked in about 5.4 trillion yuan in revenue last year, up 15.1 percent year on year. Tourism revenue stood at about 2.45 trillion for the first half of 2018, up 12.5 percent year on year.
Tags: ctrip, high speed rail network